Lady Wisdom: A Guided Meditation

Proverbs 9: 1-6

 Lady Wisdom

Lady Wisdom: A Guided Meditation

Proverbs 9:1-6

         The book of Proverbs is a collection of wise sayings and poems compiled over a period of several hundred years, some of which may go back to the days of King Solomon’s court.  In Proverbs’ opening chapters, wisdom is personified as a woman created “before the beginning of the earth” (8: 22-23).  Lady Wisdom, or “Sophia” in the Greek, has been linked to the "Word" in John’s Gospel, (“Logos” in the Greek), which was with God from the beginning. Some groups in Judaism and early Christianity considered Sophia to be a significant religious figure, though our English translations fail to retain her explicitly feminine character except in a few passages like this one.  Funny how the feminine images of God are easily recognized as metaphors, but the masculine images for the divine remain literalized.  Recently, however, there has been a renewed appreciation for long neglected feminine images of the sacred, as exemplified in the hymn to Holy Wisdom we sang earlier.
         Did you notice the way Lady Wisdom also resembles Jesus?  In today’s reading she’s associated with feeding others, as was Jesus, who invited all, especially the least, to the great banquet of God.  Like Jesus, whose life and death and resurrection we memorialize at this very table, Lady Wisdom set her sumptuous but simple table with bread and wine. 
         The writer of Proverbs describes Lady Wisdom sending out her invitation into the town.  Wisdom’s voice can be heard by the foolish and immature on the ordinary streets of their ordinary lives. In the ordinariness of our daily lives, we, too, can hear wisdom’s call.
         Some believe listening to life is the key to spiritual growth.  We can listen to ancient insights found in scripture, to the circumstances of our lives, to the people in our lives whom we love and respect and the enemies who nevertheless have lessons for us, too.  Sometimes the things we really don’t want to hear are the words we most need to hear. Lady Wisdom calls us to turn off the harmful tapes we unthinkingly keep playing in our heads, to hear the murmurs of this world with a heart full of Christ’s compassion, to listen to our lives as a spiritual discipline that can make us “willing to change ourselves and our world” (Muller 19). 

         One reason we come to this place and this table each week is to listen.  The “Sabbath is an incubator for wisdom. When we allow the rush and pressure of our days to fall away, even for a short period, we are more able to discern the essential truth of what lies before us” (Muller 165).  If we can pause from life’s distractions, listen for what is true about ourselves and our world, we will hear Lady Wisdom summoning us to a banquet already available to us.  But our meal with Wisdom must begin by knowing and accepting the generous compassion being extended to us. 

         I invite you now to do a very hard thing.  Richard Rohr says, “The simplest spiritual discipline is some degree of solitude and silence. But it's the hardest, because none of us wants to be with someone we don't love. Besides that, we invariably feel bored with ourselves, and all of our loneliness comes to the surface. We won't have the courage to go into that terrifying place without Love to protect us and lead us, without the light and love of God overriding our self-doubt.”

         So let us hold silence to contemplate a boundless love that is our origin and our destiny. I invite you to imagine God’s love pouring over you like warm waves that calm you and flow through you to others.  There is no fear in this place. Worries are washed away, our need to control and to know with certitude flow away and compassion for ourselves and others flows in and through us. Feel these waves of love and care.
SILENCE
         Immersed in divine love, we can move into deeper waters of discernment.  I’ll use the famous Serenity Prayer as our guide.  It might very well be titled the Wisdom prayer. Let me read it to you:

God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.  (Reinhold Niebuhr) 

         Wisdom is the lynchpin of this prayer.

         Pause now to consider:  What is one thing, a fairly important thing, you know you cannot change about yourself?  This is something you’d like to change but you cannot.   SILENCE
         What is one thing you can change? This is something you really want to change and though it would be difficult, it would be possible to change.  SILENCE
         With Lady Wisdom at your side, ask yourself how certain you are that the first thing is impossible to change and the second thing is doable?  Great wisdom is needed to tell the difference between what we can and cannot change.  Pause now.  Are you sure you’ve placed these two things you would like to change in their proper categories?  Maybe there’s something in your life you really can change but you’d nearly given up on doing so.  Maybe there’s something in your life you need to accept with grace and then recognize it may hold some gift for you.
         Fortunately, at the core of Christianity is the sense of community, so our task of discernment is both individual and communal.  We can bring others into our discernment processes. 
         And we as a faith community can continually ask probing questions together about our church.  According to a study Diana Butler Bass conducted of fifty remarkably vital congregations, one characteristic these churches all had in common was the regular practice of discerning, together, what steps they would take into the future.  These vital churches regularly planned times to ask questions of God and then listen carefully for God’s wisdom for their congregation: Who are we?  What does God want us to do? These churches practiced discernment by telling stories together; asking straightforward questions together; listening deeply, respectfully and empathically to one another; praying together with a genuine desire to find and follow a common path.  They regularly scheduled opportunities to do these things together as a way to make important decisions and achieve greater focus.
         But beware. Discernment for churches and individuals usually does not simply confirm our hunches.  Instead, it is a perilous practice that involves honesty, attentiveness, and risk.  And it often redirects our lives.  Discernment led me, as a contented 40-something English teacher, to give up my profession and pay check and become a seminary student.  Discernment has led some congregations to take unpopular stands and make difficult choices. 
         With Wisdom comes the obligation to deal with life head on, with open eyes and honest heart and courageous conviction. It is wisdom who calls us, who calls whole congregations, to reach the fullness of our humanity.  
Let us pray:

O Wisdom, may each choice we make be governed by your Spirit.  We pray this in the name of the one who was your Word and Wisdom made flesh.  Amen.

Bass, Diana Butler.  Christianity for the Rest of Us.  New York: HarperCollins, 2006.

Muller, Wayne.  Sabbath: Finding Rest, Renewal, and Delight in our Busy Lives.  New York:   Bantam, 1999.

Rohr, Richard. “Silence” Richard’s Daily Meditations. (August 19, 2012).                  http://myemail.constantcontact.com/Daily-Meditation--Silence----August-19--            2012.html?soid=1103098668616&aid=L1hBBRwDOSU

Holy Breath

Texts:  Acts 2: 1-18; Ezekiel 37: 1-14

God's Breath

      The season of Easter concludes as the season of Pentecost begins. We affirm today that the vibrant spirit that animated Jesus the Christ remains alive in Body of Christ. Of course, the Spirit that enlivens and unites all creation did not suddenly make an appearance in this world 2000 years ago.  As our opening hymn and scriptures remind us, the Spirit brooded over the chaotic waters of creation, and spoke through the Hebrew prophets, and inspired the life of Jesus, and then, when earth felt most bereft, that same spirit blew through the people at Pentecost “on the rush of a wind.”[i] The same vivifying force continues to blow through the cosmos today. Sometimes the wind is wild and unpredictable, disrupting old patterns of thought so that we can, in the words of the prophet Joel, “see new visions” (Acts 2:17).  At other times the movement of the Spirit is a gentle breath, resuscitating deadened hearts.

         I’ve thought often this week about the way the Bible’s writers imagined God as breath, especially as two of our own have struggled to breathe.  Both ___ and ___  have lain in two different hospitals for more than a week with pneumonia, a disease whose name derives from the same Greek word pneuma that Christian scriptures use to mean 1) spirit, 2) breath, and 3) wind.  The Spirit of God IS both a gentle breath that restores us to life and a wild wind that reshapes us.

        

         Two biblical stories of God’s pneuma blow through our Pentecost celebration today.  The first is an eerily quiet Spirit, invisibly attendant over the bleakest landscape you could imagine.  But the Prophet Ezekiel did somehow imagine it:  a desolate valley of bones—bleached white and brittle dry—a mass grave of thousands upon thousands, and no living thing in sight. This nightmare might have originated in stories of the Hebrew people who were carted off to Babylon after Jerusalem’s destruction. Perhaps as the captives were forcibly marched away from their homeland, Ezekiel’s people walked past open graves of their dead, bleak signposts of their people’s doom.  But this dream has such utter lifelessness that it seems imaginatively accessible only to those of our generation who have seen, for example, pictures of the mass graves of Auschwitz, Dachau, and Bergen-Belsen. Or to those who only now can grasp humanity’s potential for nuclear holocaust. How could a pre-atomic bomb civilization from the 6^th Century BCE conceive of a world so entirely swept clean of all life?   How could any pre-Apollo 11 writer depict an earthscape so like a moonscape, so empty of even one blade of grass or one droplet of water or one slight breeze?

        

         How could anyone then or now, standing imaginatively before such a nightmare, imagine any way of going forward after such obliteration?  

         The only thing to do in such a time is to be very still and wait upon the Spirit.  The Spirit can show us the bleached bones piling up in our lives or in our community or on our planet.  The Spirit that birthed the church can even reveal in the Church itself the bleached bones piling up in grand cathedrals and storefront churches. We are called to witness these signs.  And to listen in the soundlessness as the Enlivening Spirit breathes her resuscitating breath.  Hear the horror and hope of bones rattling as they come together into human form again: toe bones connecting to the foot bones, foot bones connecting to the . . . ankle bones, ankle bones connecting to the . . . shin bones. “Now hear the word of the Lord: Them bones, them bones gonna rise again.”

        

         Horror and hope mingle in such a landscape. Fear of the strange combines with an instinct for change. We’re not sure we want to witness resurrection, much less experience it ourselves, but how can we not choose renewal?  In Ezekiel’s vision, resurrection looks like we’re rewinding that gruesome scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark where the Nazi villain, having gazed into the Ark of the Covenant, is melted away, layer by layer, to a skeleton.  Ezekiel the prophet sees a reversal of bodily decay as sinews reattach to bone and skin reform on sinew.  Yet these reassembled humans remain in inert piles, a still horrifying sight because “there was no breath in them” (Ezekiel 37:8).  So the prophet summons the very Breath of God:  “Come from the four winds, O Spirit.  Come, Breath of God” (37:9).

        

         And in his dream “the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood on their feet, a vast multitude” (37:10), indeed “the whole house of Israel” (37:11). 

         Friends, you and I sometimes feel like the living dead.  We go through the motions of life without passion.  We make the same mistakes, follow the same habits, zombie-like.  When we enter the bleak landscape, let us summon the Spirit. 

        

         And let us remember Ezekiel dreamed about a whole group of people who’d lost hope.  The process of being reassembled and reconnected and revivified happens to whole communities as people stand on their feet again TOGETHER, a vast multitude that can move out of the valley of the dry bones.  

         We come together as a church to draw a deep collective breath. Together. As even now you can I can fill our lungs and feel the gentle breath of God connecting us to creation, to one another, to enlivening purposes.  This is one story of the Spirit as a quiet breath that restores us to ourselves and one another and God’s loving intentions.

         Today’s second story, from the book of Acts, describes the coming of the Spirit “like the rush of a violent wind” (Acts 2:2). God’s rough wind did not comfort the disciples, did not softly redirect them, did not breezily rearrange a few of their priorities or prejudices.  No, “like the rush of a violet wind” the pneuma shook those gathered for Pentecost into a radical new awareness that God would now work through them. 

         The original Spirit-filled church born on Pentecost began dramatically. No wonder that kind of fervor was unsustainable.  So eventually the followers of Jesus traded the risky “faith of Jesus” for a safer “religion about Jesus.”  Church leaders soon began creating rules and rituals rather than roadways toward the Always New.

         Yet even today there are spiritual descendants of the first Spirit-infused disciples, and they remember that Jesus had to pass through death into life, had to walk through the lonesome valley of the dry bones.  Novelist Reynolds Price, who nearly died from cancer 20 years ago and who finally met his physical death last year, came to value the Spirit’s way of dying to the old so the new can be born.  In one interview he commented on the therapies that saved his life but lost him the use of his legs.  He explained, “When you undergo huge traumas in middle life, everybody is in league with us to deny that the old life is ended.  Everybody is trying to patch us up and get us back to who we were, when in fact what we need to be told is, ‘You’re dead.  Who are you going to be tomorrow?’” 

         Ezekiel was telling the exiled Jews, “We’re dead. Who are we going to be tomorrow?”  We are no longer in Jerusalem.  We will get there eventually.  But even here in this seemingly Godforsaken time and place, we can tap into the Spirit of God. 

         “You’re dead,” Ezekiel continues to tell us today.  So . . . who are YOU going to be tomorrow . . . if you cannot be patched up after illness or bereavement or financial loss or family crisis or some colossal screw up or some average disappointment?  Can you be some new someone who is alive and awake spiritually?

         “You’re dead,” Ezekiel prophesies to the 21^st Century Church. So who are YOU going to be when the next Great Awakening stirs the corpses sitting silently now in your many pews?  Will the Church continue to produce preachers who spew deadly hate speech?  Will the church continue to cover up the abuse of children?  Will the church continue to worship a violent God?  Will the church continue to scapegoat a few in the name of moral purity and miss Jesus’s mission to care for “the least of these”?  Many already hear dry bones a’ rattling and a violent wind a’wailing as a spiritual REVIVAL spreads among many faiths, a movement some are calling the world’s first interfaith Awakening.  Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, and Hindus are being revived as they emphasize compassionate living over correct doctrine, as they find what is true for them through their own experiences and reason more than from religious authorities and literal interpretations of sacred texts, as they borrow and adapt spiritual practices from one another to create healthier persons and a healthier planet.[ii]

        

         While it may seem that dogmatism and fundamentalism are increasing, they are really the inevitable backlash of frightened people to this multireligious Awakening.  Anxiety in times of change is normal.  After all, it IS scary to watch the dead come to life. But our age’s own Ezekiels are beginning to prophesy their visions of new life. 

         When we recognize, sometimes in the unlikeliest of places, the Spirit’s movement, we can cooperate with the Spirit to root out the dead parts in our individual lives and create freer faith communities upon the ruins of the dying church.  The pneuma may be fierce but it is blowing out the deadened bits of hierarchy, literalism, and tribalism in order to make way for radical compassion, inclusion, unity, peace, and liberation—the aims of a global spiritual awakening. 

         On the birthday of the Church, let us thank God for the pioneers of our faith as we ourselves continue to pioneer ever faithful and ever new ways of following Jesus and responding to the pneuma of God. Open Table has a prophetic role to play in recognizing what has died and seeing where the Spirit is moving in the world so we can join in that work.

         The poet Wendell Berry is one of my nominees for a modern prophet, a successor to Ezekiel.  His poem “A Vision” might be the anthem for this new spiritual awakening:

If we will have the wisdom to survive,
to stand like slow-growing trees
on a ruined place, renewing, enriching it,
if we will make our seasons welcome here,
asking not too much of earth or heaven,
then a long time after we are dead
the lives our lives prepare will live
there, their houses strongly placed
upon the valley sides, fields and gardens
rich in the windows. The river will run
clear, as we will never know it,
and over it, birdsong like a canopy.
On the levels of the hills will be
green meadows, stock bells in noon shade.
On the steeps where greed and ignorance cut down
the old forest, an old forest will stand,
its rich leaf-fall drifting on its roots.
The veins of forgotten springs will have opened.
Families will be singing in the fields.
In their voices they will hear a music
risen out of the ground. They will take
nothing from the ground they will not return,
whatever the grief at parting. Memory,
native to this valley, will spread over it
like a grove, and memory will grow
into legend, legend into song, song
into sacrament. The abundance of this place,
the songs of its people and its birds,
will be health and wisdom and indwelling
light. This is no paradisal dream.
Its hardship is its possibility.

PRAYER: Spirit, lead us from the valley of dry bones to this Edenic valley of peace. When Pentecost truly comes to us again, revive our bone-dead faith so that our men and women, young and old can see visions—like this one. Equip us, Holy Wisdom, to take up the hard, hard task of bringing that vision to reality. Amen

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[i] “Spirit” by James K. Manley © 1975 by James K. Manley Publishing.

[ii] Dianna Butler Bass insightfully describes this interfaith awakening in her latest book Christianity After Religion: The End of Church and the Birth of a New Spiritual Awakening. 

A Chariot for a Church

Acts 8: 26-40

          Picture this. Out in a desert wilderness two strangers, traveling side-by-side in a chariot, share an ancient sacred scroll into which they are enfolding their own questions and stories.  The Ethiopian’s chariot is, for me, a perfect metaphor for church. Neither a steeple, nor a pulpit, nor a pew speaks to me about the church, ancient or modern, like this particular chariot. Even a baptismal font is not the church’s best symbol—though today’s story culminates in a baptism.  No, my favorite symbol for the church is this chariot. I think our job, new church, is to travel with one another in side-by-side mutuality and love as we hold the scroll between us, share our questions and stories, and mark moments of transcendence and transformation with ritual. Church is primarily, for me, a vehicle for a story sharing community that is moving out into a hurting world and moving into God’s hopeful future.

         Two Sundays ago we started listing things we as a new congregation have been learning and becoming. We may have thought the children weren’t paying attention, but of course they were.  Soon they chimed in. We listened respectfully when 6-year-old Stella shared that when Open Table began worshiping in this particular space, she arrived here with her family that first Sunday last October expecting a different congregation would be inside. We hadn’t thought to explain to her that we would ALL be moving together to a new worship place. So she was relieved to realize, as she stepped into this beautiful sanctuary, that we were the same church, just in a new location.  As she put it, “I learned we are the church everywhere we go!”  I shared that story last week with the group of UCC pastors who were meeting through a conference call. They loved Stella’s phrase. Someone closed our conference call with that very phrase: “Let’s remember: ‘We are the church everywhere we go!’”  I won’t be surprised if “We are the church everywhere we go” becomes the next slogan of the UCC.  We’ll make sure Stella gets credit!*

         Let’s look closer at that chariot, first to appreciate its most obvious characteristic: its mobility.  Unlike this stationary pulpit, a traditional symbol of the proclaimed Word, the wheeled chariot’s purpose is forward movement. Followers of Jesus are impelled to move out into the world with care and compassion. Certainly Jesus ministered nomadically as he traveled from village to village.  And even reading the Bible or praying, seemingly stationary spiritual disciplines, requires figurative movement, mental and soulful meanderings. Though “going on a journey to find spiritual meaning is nothing new,” Diana Butler Bass suggests that the question shaping 21^st century spirituality is not “Who am I?” but “Where am I?” (p. 178). The Christian journey is just that—“a pilgrimage to the self, and ultimately to God” (193).[i]  The church must itself be able to respond with agility to the needs and understandings of rapidly changing times.  And the times, they are a changin’.

         Culture watchers have observed that Christianity is undergoing a seismic shift the likes of which have not been seen for 500 years.  For Christianity to survive, it must take into account the last century’s scientific theories, technological advances, horrific genocides, globalization, interfaith conversations, and postmodern perspectives that have been chiseling way at the church’s doctrinal foundations.  In response to these perceived threats, Fundamentalists have fearfully transformed their churches into fortresses.  Meanwhile, many postmoderns have abandoned the church entirely.  But some Jesus followers understand that the church is always being re-formed, and it is possible for the church to be faithful to the essence of the Christian faith while incorporating postmodern values of pluralism, ambiguity, shared authority, mystery in tandem with reason, science in concert with art, spirituality in the service of social justice. Many follow in the way of Jesus without claiming Jesus is the only way to a harmonious oneness which is the aim of all spirituality. As the UCC is fond of saying, “God is still speaking.” So some Christians have set out in their chariots.

         Other Christians have meanwhile been stirring together values of intolerance, biblical literalism, and hierarchy, but they will find that this mixture will set up around them like theological concrete.  In yesterday’s Press-Register one local minister invoked the Church’s “immutable moral laws” to condemn homosexuality.[ii] But the one immutable law Jesus named was love.  Our understandings of what is moral do sometimes need to change.

         The forward motion that Christianity needs will come from neither reinforced nor even reformed doctrine but from a revived appreciation for the community of God and the revised version of the Jesus Story, a version actually more authentic to its origins.  Which takes us back to the chariot metaphor.

         The chariot pictures well not only the forward motion of the church but also another important aspect of the church:  its communal quality.  That side-by-side relationship required in chariot riding symbolizes a nonhierarchical type of ministry I admire.  As we return to the passage in Acts, note that the ambiguous status of the Ethiopian makes him a fit symbol of a leveled, inclusive church. 

         On the one hand, the owner of the chariot is the wealthy, literate, and powerful treasurer of an African realm—but he humbly deigns to pick up a hitchhiker whom he invites to travel side-by-side with him in the chariot as an equal. Thus, the Ethiopian levels the power differential.  He even admits to needing help understanding the sacred text of another faith tradition he has been reading.  I would not be surprised if this privileged male were humble enough to stop his chariot and ask for directions if he got lost!  And in fact that is what he’s doing. 

         On the other hand, the Ethiopian’s foreignness might have relegated him below Philip’s status and his asexuality as a eunuch would have, according to the Deuteronomic law, prevented him from entering the Temple.  Since the Ethiopian is on a return trip from Jerusalem, it’s likely this man had attempted to enter the Temple to worship Isaiah’s God, whom he’s been reading about in the scroll--but was denied admittance because his sexuality was not “normal.”  Even the Ethiopian’s oddly-worded request for baptism-- “What is to prevent me from being baptized?” suggests he fears, based on past experience, that some rule or prohibition will prevent his type from being included in the family of God.  However, Philip disregards the religious codes of exclusivity. He also does some leveling.  He tells the Ethiopian that God’s realm does indeed include him.   

         The relational aspect of the chariot tells us that the Gospel should come at the invitation of a fellow traveler, not as doctrine or diatribe but rather as dialogue. Jesus’ hopeful way is understood in community and put into practice in community. Reading scripture—or interpreting the texts of our lives—should happen collaboratively. In reading the Bible together we are not so much engaged in a process to see truth in the Bible as we are seeing through the Bible, as if it were a shared lens on the world. You and I see through the Bible together to the world beyond. Church is a Spirit-led community that learns and loves and sees together as our individual lives and our culture are transformed.

         Which brings me to a final observation about this forward moving, relational chariot: it contains a scroll.  Chariot riding is an occasion for a community to read and understand the Jesus Story through an ancient text while moving that story into the future.  During our last book study, one of you asked an important question: “If the Bible requires so much effort to interpret it in healthy ways, why keep reading it?” Another way to ask that question is “Can we still be the Church without the Bible?”  Or, in terms of today’s Bible story, “Must we travel with the scroll? Why not chunk it from the chariot, or find another, or compose our own as we travel?  Can we journey together as a church without the Bible?”

         I don’t think so. I answer somewhat tentatively because I love studying the Bible, so I recognize my biases.  But I think I need both the freedom of the chariot and the rootedness and connectedness of the biblical scroll.  Certainly you and I may bring additional books with us on our journey.  But the church-as-chariot needs the biblical scroll, not to serve as a road map that tells us literally where to go, but to function more like a dictionary that offers us a common language and heritage, as a book of liturgy to shape our worship life, and as a storybook that grounds us in narrative frame that has been richly meaningful for thousands of years.  Individuals can move forward spiritually without the scroll, but if we as a community are to move together in the way of Jesus, we need a shared lexicon and a common story of how others have experienced the Sacred.  Besides, we have permission to argue with some of the Book's perspectives when the Spirit guides us to do so.

         The Ethiopian and Philip see Jesus through a particular scroll that they hold between them: the book of Isaiah written hundreds of years before Philip and the Ethiopian were born.  While our standard Christian gloss on that ancient Hebrew text is to identify Jesus as Isaiah’s “lamb…who opens not his mouth,” that was not the original writer’s referent.  But hundreds of years later the writer of the book of Acts took Isaiah’s well-known poem and engrafted onto it the story of Jesus.  We see how Philip uses the text to connect with the Ethiopian and to bring the text forward into relevance for his time and place. We can do that, too.

         Verse 35 reads: “Then Philip began to speak, and starting with this scripture, he proclaimed to him the good news about Jesus.” Here we often “begin with scripture” but then ask, How does this passage point toward Jesus and GOOD news?  If our interpretations don’t add up to the Good News of God’s love and grace, of reconciliation and resurrection, perhaps our scriptural inquiry is just shoring up unhealthy theology.  One way to keep biblical study focused on Good News, not bad, is through collaborative interpretation.   We need to test the Story’s goodness together.

         Unfortunately, Christianity’s story has not always seemed good. Brian McLaren writes, “The failure of the world’s religions, especially the two largest religions, is to provide a framing story capable of healing or reducing the world’s current environmental, economic, and political crises.”[iii]  As scandalous as it sounds, Christianity’s story needs revision to do just that.  Progressive Christians are retelling the Christian story afresh. 

         Progressive Christians, rather than bemoaning the decline in church attendance and religious affiliation, are instead seizing this moment in the history of the church to unlearn some damaging parts of the story and to rewrite the ever-evolving Jesus Story.  Christians cannot simply chunk from the chariot an unhealthy version of the Jesus Story.  We must reframe the story as some have told it. We must make sure we tell it with compassion and healing and unity.  And we have to add our own stories to the foundational story of Jesus.

         That’s what Kenny did last week.  He wove his own story of hope and love into the Jesus Story.  Now is the time and the church is the place to jettison the misguided versions of the Jesus Story, to unlearn those, but to do more than that, to rewrite that story with words of hope and healing.  Parts of the Jesus story have been distorted to exclude or demean or control, but we can reclaim them for healing and peaceful purposes. 

         I believe Christians can reframe the Jesus story "for the healing of the nations."  Certainly other spiritual paths are also worthy and healing.  Indeed, the exclusive version of the Jesus Story I grew up with no longer works for me.  Yet my appreciation for pluralism in no way diminishes my conviction of the power of the Jesus Story to bring in God’s reign of peace and love.  To me, everything depends on this.  Not just the future viability of the church.  The future of our planet depends on whether or not people can follow in Jesus’s way—whether they attribute that path to Jesus or not.   

         Our version of the Story we tell needs to capture this urgency.  Our planet is in peril, and this is a saving story.  I know of none better.  But I won’t be able to explore it and then live into it without fellow pilgrims. 

         The story we read and interpret together has an urgent, saving, timeless message.  But the story needs to be reframed and carried forward in the communal chariot we call the church. That's what we at Open Table are trying to do.

         Thanks be to God for traveling companions like you! 

*After the service, Stella told me that her sister Chloe may have been the one who came up with the words "We are the church everywhere we go!"  She thinks she started the story but Chloe may have helped tell the story and added the final sentence--as sisters sometimes do.  Stella wanted Chloe to get proper credit.  I apologize for not remembering Chloe's additions to the story. We want to give her proper credit. Thanks, Stella and Chloe!

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[i] Bass, Diana Butler.  Christianity After Religion: The End of Church and the Birth of a New Spiritual Awakening.  New York: Harper One, 2012.

[ii] Shields, Bry.  “Who Is It That Really Discriminates?” Mobile Press-Register  (5 May 2012) 1D.

[iii] McLaren, Brian.  Everything Must Change.  Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2007.

When We Are the Women

Text:  Mark 16: 1-8

from “Cancion” by Denise Levertov

. . . When I am a woman—O, when I am a woman,
my wells of salt brim and brim,
poems force the lock of my throat.

When we are the women at Easter’s empty tomb, when we imaginatively enter Mark’s resurrection story as if we were Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome, we initially approach the day’s traditional rites with dutiful solemnity.  But when we are these women, O when we are the Easter women, old duties suddenly seem pointless, as pointless as anointing a dead body that can no longer be found, as senseless as anointing dead doctrines of Christianity with sweet smelling words.  Suddenly, new possibilities seize us with both “terror and amazement” (Mark 16:8). 

I invite you to enter the Easter story today in the spirit of these three women. I invite you to let resurrection dawn upon you both suddenly and slowly, until the poetry of Easter unlocks your throats. I invite you to consider what the women’s experience of the resurrection can teach us.

You would probably appreciate some background on Mary, Mary, and Salome, our avatars at the tomb, but the Gospels reveal little, tradition is inconsistent, and surely these characters serve a literary not literal function. Indeed, the four Gospels offer four different resurrection stories with four different casts of characters at the empty tomb. They can’t all be factually true. But we can be sure of the radically countercultural way Jesus respected and included women.  And before we make too much of the fact that the women fled at the end of Mark’s Gospel, remember Mark previously told us the male disciples had either betrayed, denied, or deserted Jesus while the women had stayed near the cross and had dared to anoint his body on the third day while the men hid. The women’s flight from the tomb was Mark’s way of signaling, in the final words of his story, that even the women ran away at the very end.

Let’s also bear in mind what these women witnessed earlier: the torture and death of the prophet, teacher, and beloved friend who’d brought them healing and hope.  In an atmosphere of betrayal and conspiracy, how could they trust or even make sense of the stranger’s message that the crucified Jesus would meet them later in Galilee? So they ran away. And they told no one.

Mark ends not with a triumphant proclamation that “He is risen!” but with fear and silence.

I emphasize that unsettling point because it is not how you THINK the story ends. Each Gospel presents a very different account of Jesus’s resurrection, and you might have subconsciously added some details to today’s reading that are not there.  Look back at the Gospel reading to see if your eyes and ears deceived you.  Did you notice that in the resurrection story which concludes the Gospel of Mark, the resurrected Jesus never appears? Mark’s readers glimpse an empty tomb and a man (not an angel, by the way) telling the women that Jesus is risen. But a post-resurrection Jesus does not appear to the women, does not allow the doubting Thomas to see the nail prints in his hands, does not ascend into heaven.  Look back at the final verses and keep in mind these are the final verses of Mark’s entire biography of Jesus, our oldest Gospel and the one Matthew and Luke took as their main source. Mark ends abruptly with the statement that the women fearfully keep the story to themselves, contrary to the messenger’s command. Mark ends with terror and silence. If Mark had been the only Gospel to survive, we would have only the secondhand testimony of an anonymous man who told the women Jesus had risen.  We would not know if the women believed this stranger. We would only know they had run away, and though the man in white told them to tell the others Jesus was alive, the book ends with the narrator’s statement that they did not. 

Well, Happy Easter.

Of course, if we had only Mark’s Gospel, we’d still recognize that someone at some point told something of this experience, else the Marcan community would not have passed along the story to us! But Mark’s version of the resurrection does not attest to any original disciple knowing and sharing the news that Jesus had been raised to new life. 

Yes, some versions of Mark do add another twelve verses to tidy things up a bit with appearances of Jesus to various people mentioned in Matthew, Luke, and John and well as his ascension to heaven.  But almost all scholars agree those twelve verses were added to Mark many years later in at least two stages, and the best translations omit them.  The oldest manuscripts do not contain verses 9-20.  Perhaps a conscientious scribe wanted to improve upon the story’s ending.  After all, maybe the final page was lost or maybe the writer dropped dead before writing the most important words of the Jesus story. We can forgive an overly zealous monk for wanting to correct an ending that hardly seemed to ring with Easter enthusiasm.

But in this case one or more copyists, eager to affirm the eternal Christ, likely added verses that, in effect, hindered future readers from recognizing Mark’s rhetorical methods. You see, some biblical scholars think the original ending is the culmination of a brilliant strategy Mark has been building up to all along. Over and over Mark shows us that the disciples do not understand Jesus’s mission.  Repeatedly, Jesus tells them NOT to tell anyone what they have seen and heard--though some tell anyway--because they still do not comprehend the meaning and methods of God’s reign.  They are not capable of transmitting the Good News yet.  However, after the crucifixion, the followers of Jesus can no longer insist that he will rule with power and might.  After the cruel cross, after the empty tomb, Jesus’s way of radical love is unmistakable. At last his followers can understand.  At last they are commissioned to tell the Good News.

And that is when, ironically, the most perceptive, even the women, flee in fear and confusion.  And there the story ends.

But we as the readers understand. Mark plays to the reader’s understanding in contrast with the original disciples’ lack of understanding.  Mark’s first readers already affirmed that Jesus was resurrected in the lives of their faith community.  Mark’s first readers were living through persecution and peril and were themselves beset by fear.  The rhetorical move that Mark makes is to invest them with the responsibility of carrying on the work of Jesus, to be the faithful ones in contrast with the first disciples. And 2000 years later, you and I also read of the women’s silence and resolve that we will carry forward the Good News.  We feel the responsibility for continuing the Way of Resurrection. We know that it’s now up to us.   

The young man inside the empty tomb says that Jesus the crucified has gone ahead of them to Galilee, that backwater district where he’d started his ministry.  “There you will see him, just as he told you,” says the stranger in white.

And there, in the continued work of healing and feeding and freeing folks caught in the domination system of the Empire, Jesus’s gradually comprehending followers did reunite with Jesus again.  The writer doesn’t have to fill in the blanks for us.  From this final chapter of Mark that instructs the disciples to meet up again with Jesus in Galilee, we readers circle back to Mark’s first chapter and recall where Mark’s story began, with Jesus calling the first disciples from their fishing nets along the Galilean shoreline.  You’ll see him there again, the strange messenger in white says, as you fish for people and rescue them from the waters of Empire.

Here are two things I understand about resurrection: it happens gradually and it happens in community.

It is no wonder that the resurrection took a symbolic three days. Realizations dawn slowly. Mary, Mary, and Salome could not perceive the resurrection of Jesus immediately.  But in the forty years between Jesus’s state execution and the writing of the Gospel of Mark, the Marcan community had time to make meaning together out of the beauty of Jesus’ life and the horror of his death and the continued real and transforming presence of his Spirit among them. Gradually and communally they created this story of what the vital, healing, transforming way of Jesus meant to them.

And this is why I suggested we become the women.  So that we realize the point of Mark’s seemingly unacceptable ending is that we not allow the story to end there.  We take up the women's role from there.     

Mark’s clever rhetorical choices make the readers into the sole possessors of the Gospel. Like the people who first read Mark’s Gospel, we should come away feeling that it’s up to us to carry on the mission of Jesus. We have heard the story.  The original actors in the story failed to some extent perhaps, but the story lives on as long as we tell it with our lives.

              

Sure, the story continues to get extended and reinterpreted and sometimes manipulated and mangled.  The beautiful story of Easter gets co-opted by Hallmark and Cadbury and politicians and preachers.  But even you and I get to “contribute a verse,” to borrow a phrase from Dead Poets Society.

However, if you are like the women, you need some time before the poetry unlocks your throat.  You need time, I need time, for the story to unfold in our hearts and lives. 

Like Mary and Mary and Salome, we react first with fear when we face something totally unexpected.  Even good news may sound threatening.  And we may flee. But when we DO go to Galilee and begin that healing work in the world, we see where Christ remains, Christ who is the heart and mind of God.  And we find resurrection—slow and communal resurrection—happening in and through us.

We at Open table have witnessed recently the beginnings of resurrection as Rosemarie has come back from the brink of the grave.  But resurrection is NOT instantaneous—as those know who watch Rosemarie make slow, hard progress to think and speak and move.  Likewise, it took many days or perhaps years for the followers of the Way to frame their story into meaningfulness for their lives. 

Even when we’re in the process of resurrection, it doesn’t always feel wonderful.  Just ask Rosemarie.  

Occasionally one of you will say something like this to me: “Sometimes I wish I hadn’t returned to church after all these years.  It was easier not to think about Jesus and church.  It’s hard now to rethink Christianity and try to live in ways that are consistent with Jesus’s life.  This is all harder than I thought.”

Resurrection happens slowly and communally.  Sometimes our first impulse is to run from a bracing or unexpected word.  That’s okay.  Because after awhile, the Spirit of truth and love lures us back. 

Joan Chittister says that “until we find ourselves with new hearts, more penetrating insights, less need for the transient, greater awareness of the spiritual pulse of life, resurrection has not really happened for us.”

Mark’s resurrection story is about what is happening in us and through us. Mark’s resurrection story happens to people in community.   

There will be folks who participate in Open Table for awhile and then leave.  Even the good news of Progressive Christianity that is reviving a moribund church will frighten away some. 

But our mission at Open Table is not to put Christianity on life support.  Some things must die so that others can be reborn.  It’s scary when religious assumptions are questioned, when the parts of Christianity we once held as essential are stripped off like binding grave clothes so we are free to walk out of religion’s tomb. A new self, a renewed church comes out of that darkness.  

 

But be assured, friends, that our small congregation is not alone in recognizing that American Christianity “is flailing and failing.”  A “spiritually renewed and intellectually credible Christianity” has been undergoing resurrection for the last two decades. An article this week titled “A Resurrected Christianity?” by Diana Butler Bass is one of many suggesting that what we at Open Table are doing is in line with a growing movement of liberal mainline Protestant churches, “Emerging" churches, and progressive Catholics from “around the edges of organized religion” asking new questions and trying to “reform, reimagine, and reformulate” church to resurrect “a heart-centered Christianity.”[ii] 

My friends, this is extraordinary.  Once again, the body of Christ, which is the Church, is being resurrected.

Clarence Jordan said, “The proof that God raised Jesus from the dead is not the empty tomb, but the full hearts of his transformed disciples."

Like the women in the story, we are both amazed and terrified.  In fact, we don’t quite have the poetic vocabulary for this resurrection of our individual and congregational lives. But when we are the women of the story just beginning the resurrection process, wells of salt brim and brim, until finally Gospel poems force the lock of our throats. 

Christ is risen! Alleluia! 

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[ii] Bass, Diana Butler.  “A Resurrected Christianity?" Huff Post Religion (8 April 2012)          .  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/diana-butler-bass/a-resurrected-christianit_b_1410143.html?ref=fb&src=sp&comm_ref=false#sb=1329620,b=facebook